From the 16th to 18th of January 6 students from 2 classes of the 4th school-year had the opportunity to participate at the European Youth Parliament Regional Session in Melk.

But first of all, what is the European Youth Parliament?

The European Youth Parliament (EYP) is a non-governmental organisation consisting of national committees and a central office which is situated in Berlin, Germany. The EYP has ever since 1987 organised conferences for young people from all over Europe and brought together tens of thousands of pupils and students from all corners of Europe.

EYP is based on several principals: understanding, respecting other people and their opinions, co-operating, compromising and, maybe most important, making new friends. But it sees its major goals in promoting democracy, education, language skills and a European idea in Europe’s youth and tries to achieve this goal by means of international conferences, regional sessions or national events.

But what is an EYP session?

An EYP session is an event where young people come together to meet and discuss current and exciting European topics. This session was a unique experience for us and a chance to learn and have fun at the same time.

And what happens at an EYP session?

Basically, this is how an EYP session works:

1. Teambuilding: During the first days of activities, we, the delegates, will get to know each other through teambuilding and cultural activities.
2. Committee Work: Next, there will be moments for discussion and confrontation, with the aim of finding innovative solutions to real problems, underlining the importance of dialoguing with people from different social, cultural and economic backgrounds – this is what the Committee Work is all about.
3. General Assembly: Finally, all this hard work will culminate in the General Assembly. There, we will have the opportunity to not only discuss all the resolutions we have been working on during the session. We also will have to debate, attack and defend our resolution, as well as the others.

What is the result?

During the session, all delegates wrote these resolutions, which shall then be forwarded to politicians and relevant institutions for further processing. But those documents are not the only thing that we will take home from an EYP session. It was an incredible experience that allowed everyone to leave this session with newly-acquired and improved skills, good memories and new friends.

Own Opinion

The European Youth Parliament pursues two main goals: It wants to create an added value for society as a whole and individuals. It aims at engaging young people in active discussion about current social and political issues as well as giving them a deeper understanding of politics at a European level. Hereby it helps us developing our personality further.

What makes the EYP so unique is its general approach: rather than “teaching” young people, EYP gives us much more freedom as we need to work at an EYP session. We “get to know” rather than learn. We discover and find out.

By challenging with other young people all over Europe, EYP wanted to give us an opportunity to discover and realize our full potential as well as developing our personality further. We could really benefit at those diverse events and are really happy that we had the opportunity to participate in such an amazing 3-days session.

Alexander Moser, 4BBIK

Koordinatorin für das EYP: Dr. SULAN Ulrike.